


Steady Hands

by GoldenThreads



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24014500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: See, sometimes Bernadetta will go to start scribbling down her dreams after a nap, or when darting back to her room for paints because she’s found the perfect vantage point from an upper balcony, and she’ll find a ribbon on her desk. And that’s how she knows to stay awake.It’s her own fault. She’s the one whoworried, who wanted toknow, and if her heart goes all funny every time she sees one of those ribbons, well. She’d still want to know, so it doesn’t change much.Hubert always comes home. (To her?)Bernie does her best not to read into it.
Relationships: Bernadetta von Varley/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 23
Kudos: 117
Collections: Hubernie Week





	Steady Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Hubernie Week: Day One - Stitches. Didn't *quite* make it in time, but it's the love that counts! 
> 
> Warnings for Hubert-typical violence/injuries, as usual.

The nicest thing about the palace is that nobody ever wakes Bernadetta up. She has a bell for whenever she wants her breakfast, if it’s six or ten or already four in the afternoon, and Lady Edelgard lights up if Bernadetta joins her for a meal but never expects her attendance. It’s terribly nice to be in control of her own schedule for once—no maids swarming in at the crack of dawn to tear a brush through her hair and _tsk_ unhappily at her awkward curves or lack thereof, no stables to muck or exams to fail, no war table meetings or training maneuvers with her troops.

Well, there’s one part that’s not _so_ nice, but it’s…

See, sometimes Bernadetta will go to start scribbling down her dreams after a nap, or when darting back to her room for paints because she’s found the perfect vantage point from an upper balcony, and she’ll find a ribbon on her desk. And that’s how she knows to stay awake. 

It’s her own fault. She’s the one who _worried_ , who wanted to _know_ , and if her heart goes all funny every time she sees one of those ribbons, well. She’d still want to know, so it doesn’t change much.

A white ribbon is for a research trip to some moldy library or another. Sometimes letters from Linhardt turn up, or Almyran novels with fancy calligraphy for the chapter titles, or flowers made from folded up dried out palm leaves. Bernadetta’s heart keeps beating for those, and she tries to sleep, really, but usually she drifts around like a fretful ghost until she hears twin voices coming from the Emperor’s study.

Black is for a stealth mission.

Red is for.

He’s not very good at non-threatening color-coding, is the thing. It’s why Edelgard wears red. Probably. Bernadetta’s never _asked_ , but she knows them well enough to bet a basket of sweet buns that there’s some silly metaphor in there about a snowy white gown sucking up all the gore of their bloody path. 

It wasn’t a very nice war.

The new one isn’t very nice, either.

So when Bernadetta sees red ribbons, she thinks of all the things she’s never said welling up in her mouth and spilling out of her chest, the way red spills out of a pincushion soldier filled with her arrows, and she marches to the kitchen to pack a basket with all the snacks she’ll need for a long, long night. There’s a ritual to it after that, and the routine helps, sometimes.

Lock the doors. Throw a new log in the fireplace. Sort through her embroidery needles for the five smallest, sharpest ones. Bend them against the sloping arm of her rocking chair. Pass them through the fire for ten seconds. Polish with sterile gauze. Fill a basin with water. Set out fresh towels and bandages.

Wait.

Wait.

Listen.

There was a ribbon today, clipped now to Bernadetta’s blouse. As she works on her embroidery she slides all the broken pins into that wretched strip of satin, letting the twisted points snag and tear. 

She only uses one candle, beyond the lit fireplace, because Professor Manuela always said working in the dim light would make her eyes burn out, and then Linhardt and Hubert would always say, _yes, that’s how I went blind years ago,_ and Bernadetta always felt perfectly wonderfully understood. It does make her eyes tired, though. That part’s bad. But if her eyes are going to be burnt out from either sewing or crying, it’s really all the same, isn’t it?

At least this way she gets things done. Her current definitely-not-cursed project is a series of little portrait dolls for Dorothea to take back across the ocean to Brigid, so Petra doesn’t forget what they all look like. She started on the Caspar one first, and his big button eyes glimmer in the flickering light as he oversees the delicate trim on her mini Prime Minister’s frock coat. It’s gold, like the embroidery on Ferdinand’s uniform during the war, but she’s twisted the shapes into the semblance of a flying wyvern and can’t quite get the wings into a perfect mirror image on the left-hand side. 

Bernadetta tries not to mark the hours. Progress isn’t something you can measure with a clock, whether it’s crafting or…technically, what Hubert’s doing would qualify as practicing a craft, too, right? 

Wait.

Wait.

Sometimes she wonders if Edelgard knows and paces the imperial carpets too, or if Edelgard has simply spent half her life squaring her shoulders against the fact that Hubert could be out there dying _right now_ and there is nothing she could say to make him do otherwise. Maybe after someone risks dying for you so many times, it simply loses all effect. Or maybe Edelgard could really, _really_ use a hug right now too, but the very thought of asking the Emperor to snuggle while Hubert is out there juggling knives and miasma—it’s impossible. Just impossible.

The little Prime Minister joins Caspar up on the shelf, and Bernadetta pulls out her pattern pieces to start on Dorothea’s base. She still doesn’t have the right color for Linhardt’s hair, sticking pins into Hubert at the moment would be an emotional trial, and her sketches of Edelgard’s robes won’t be ready until she undergoes at least three more frustration meltdowns. She is _not_ loving all those hearts.

It always takes a bit of extra work to get the neck seam to work right, with all of the layers of fabric bunched up together against her fine needle, and Bernadetta lines up the angle before applying the right pressure—

A stone taps against the balcony window and the needle slides clear through the pad of her thumb.

_“Shit!_ Oh, no no no!” Whisking the doll away from the carnage, Bernadetta shoves her bloody thumb in her mouth and stands so fast the chair tips over in a clatter. 

There are rules about checking the balcony: approach silently, peek through the corner of the curtains to confirm the visitor, knock back twice to confirm her own identity. All of them fall by the wayside as she stumbles over and hears a puff of soft, breathy laughter from the other side of the door.

“Vulgar tonight, aren’t we,” Hubert hums. His head is tipped back to watch the stars, the heavy fall of silken black hair across his eyes hiding his expression from sight. It would be a lovely picture to paint, all longing and melodrama, but he’d never lift his eyes to the heavens like that unless his wounds had pulled something in his neck.

Bernadetta unlatches the door one-handed and frantically gestures him in.

He tilts his head in apology. “I’d better stay out here. I wouldn’t want to track blood on your carpet.”

_I wish you would,_ Bernadetta almost blurts, which is the weirdest thing she could possibly say. It’s just so much easier to tell how wounded he really is—if there are more wounds he isn’t showing her—if there’s somewhere else for the blood to go than his dark and dreary uniform!

“It’s fine, I already have,” she says around her bloody thumb, even though the little wound has already dried up. 

Hubert turns, then, and the moonlight doesn’t catch his eyes in any clever twinkle, but it’s enough for her to see his pale cheeks raise as the corners of his eyes crinkle with—some emotion she’s not going to name, but that always makes her think of a purring Hresvelgion Whisker two seconds before it claws you in the thigh for fish treats.

“Please come in,” she continues, awkwardly dropping her hand. “I’ll need the light.”

“Very well.” But ever the gentleman, he toes off his shoes at the balcony door. 

If Bernadetta carefully inspects his footprints as he makes his way to sit in front of the fireplace, that’s her business, and her relief to savor as well, once it’s clear his stockinged feet aren’t dripping with gore. There’s a full spectrum of ways Hubert can turn up after a mission: limping from an infuriating strain in his ankle, bruised and shaking with adrenaline, split open like an overripe plum, and on one particularly memorable occasion, smiling like a kitten on catnip as his body flushed out a heinous mix of poisons and antidotes. Bernadetta tracks each and every one, even when there’s absolutely nothing she can help with but he turns up anyway to sit by the fire in silence.

Tonight Bernadetta’s mission is simple: a deep cut to Hubert’s shoulder that thankfully caught the bone and missed any organs, but has every muscle in his back screaming as she brushes gentle fingers across his mottled skin. If it’s something that can be healed, he always allows his own people to fix him up before checking in at the palace. There are fewer and fewer of those these days. His enemy, whom Bernadetta has definitely not eavesdropped on any conversations about, has started lacing more and more of their weapons with a silence poison that disrupts magical healing, so if Hubert is stitched up by palace medics, even his own, there will be questions.

Questions are bad.

Talking is bad in general, actually. Bernadetta doesn’t trip over herself as much as she used to, especially with friends, but…but there must be _something_ right to say, when someone you care about gets back from a murder mission and you’ve been fretting teary-eyed and miserable about it all night—not that she supports _murder_ but supporting Hubert is probably the same thing, really, so possibly she does support murder, but _I support murder!_ is tremendously unsupportive in the end, and.

Hubert doesn’t talk, which is oddly liberating sometimes. He’s not ignoring her, just. Existing.

(Existing with her?)

He’ll sigh sometimes, as she dips a rag into the basin of fresh water, and he’ll lean into her hands when she scrubs free all the dirt and picks out any loose threads, as if welcoming the pain will make it hurt any less. Tonight he surely took something for the ache as soon as he reached the palace grounds, because he doesn’t even flinch when she peels apart the jagged edges of his wound for one final check. 

She’s not a professional at this. Obviously. But she’s been stitching him up since their school days, when she caught him trying to sneak into Professor Manuela’s office for supplies the same time _she_ was definitely-not-sneaking into the office for some of the fancy sleeping tea that Ferdinand got to have whenever his brain whirred like a dragonfly’s frantic wings. 

_You have steady hands,_ he’d said, and it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her. _If you can keep quiet, you’ll do._

So Bernadetta has practice, and she’s read a lot on the subject, but if anything ever gets infected she will definitely die of shame, even before the Emperor has her beheaded for infecting her favorite—well, most efficient—Minister with flesh rot. 

It looks as clean as it’ll get. She picks up her needle, threads it with the slippery mystery strands that Hubert supplies her with, and falls into the same pattern as earlier: angle, pressure, blood. He prefers an interrupted mattress stitch, so every few passes of the needle she has to tie it off with her nimble fingers and wipe away away the seeping streams of red. 

“Do you need anything else?” Bernadetta asks quietly as she nears the end of the work. Snacks? Pillows? A hug? A thank you?

“No.”

“Just wanted to make sure. I know there isn’t much Bernie can do, but…but Bernie wants to, if that’s okay. So you can always tell me!”

Hubert doesn’t say anything.

Stupid Bernie shouldn’t have said anything either…

No. She has a job, one he trusts her to do even though he trusts basically no one, and she’s going to do it. Bernadetta sucks in a deep breath, ties off the final knot, and reaches for the bandages. 

The position of the wound is awkward, requiring her to wrap up nearly his entire ribcage as well as diagonally across the opposite shoulder. When she reaches for the final pass, he catches her hand, and her fingers tangle in his like a dandelion puff into a spider’s web, unexpected for both. 

“Bernadetta,” he says, holding her hand so gently.

She squeaks, which is definitely an answer, because if he doesn’t say anything else she might die still sitting there, waiting.

“I realize my…care is not a particularly glamorous assignment—”

“I didn’t mean _you’re_ not very much!” Bernadetta blurts. “I meant—”

Hubert’s fingers squeeze around hers, his strange sunken callouses rasping against the many polished bumps of her arrow and needle-honed hands. “And if I have not adequately expressed my gratitude, that is my own personal failure.”

“It’s nothing. I just. Stitch.”

“Bernadetta,” he says again, and it rolls so softly from his venomous mouth, the same way it always does, as if a name is more than a brute demand for someone’s attention, fear, or favor. As if he savors it. 

He brushes over her knuckles one last time, then frees her hand to continue its task. It tumbles back to her lap like it bears all the weight upon her shoulders, upon her heart.

“In my line of work, there is no greater relief than the ability to commit yourself to another’s hands at the end of the day. I…rely upon you.”

“…Because I have steady hands?” she asks faintly.

“Because you are you.”

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that Bernadetta can say to that. She’s not _anybody._ She’s just…

Hubert awkwardly clears his throat. “I regret if that has made you feel coddled, or that I undervalue your considerable expertise as one of Her Majesty’s generals.”

“Oh. Oh! No, it’s…nice.” He’s never offended her—he _has_ to understand that. Bernadetta presses a hand to his back, a careful pressure over the bandaged wound so she can feel his heart throb beneath the bindings. “I mean, I don’t like that you go out alone into the dark—I really don’t like that much at all—but it’s who you are? You’re a protector. It’s not that you see Edelgard as a child or a damsel or any nonsense like that. And…you don’t see me like that either, I think? You just see me.”

He’s quiet again, but his skin is so very warm like this, between her care and the crackling fireplace. 

“And you know? There’s this whole big palace and all the traps and guards to watch Lady Edelgard when you’re gone, but there’s Bernie, too. It’s almost like you trust me to watch over what’s most important to you…” 

She jolts upright, both hands clutched over her mouth in horror. “I mean! I don’t think _you_ think about it that way!! I only—sometimes it feels like— Oh, Bernie…”

Hubert’s shoulders slope forward, and for a horrible moment she thinks he’s collapsing into the fireplace, but there’s only that strange rumble of laughter again, fondness fluttering free with his every shallow breath. “Funny. Her Highness told me much the same.”

Of course she did. Edelgard must give him all sorts of praise in private, about how very dutiful and dashing he is, how his work is worthwhile and his absence is—wait. _“Wait! Which_ thing! Not, not that she’s watching over s-something important for you, right?!”

He tips his head to the side, one baleful eye gleaming at her over his shoulder. “My apologies, but I must cut short our evening. I have a report to deliver.”

“H-Hubert!” Bernadetta’s hand flit nervously over him as he stands, ready to steady him at any point as his muscles shift around the new stitches. Only when he nearly dips into a bow does she grab him firmly by the upper arms. “You need to rest, not—oh, just stay here and I’ll get Lady Edelgard myself!”

“Oh?”

“D-don’t _oh_ me! Here, sit on the couch.” 

“Ah,” he says instead, utterly infuriating even as he meekly follows her command. “But these are your quarters. Do you intend to lurk outside your own door while Her Majesty and I discuss such matters as you have surely never heard?”

If he keeps looking up at her so patiently, her eyes will bug out of her head under the scrutiny, so Bernadetta hurriedly stuffs every pillow and blanket onto the couch and leaves her snack basket at his feet. She doesn’t answer the question. “Okay. Okay, now just stay there. Don’t move any muscles until we get back.”

“None?”

“Not even your eyelids!” The heat on her cheeks is definitely, _definitely_ from the fireplace and not his gentle teasing. “Promise?”

When Bernadetta looks back, Hubert’s eyes are closed. She’s not sure she’s ever seen him that way, not sleeping but merely…calm. All the sharp lines of his face have gone slack with rest, all save the terrifying curl of his lips as he hums his dread promise.

“We're in your hands.”

**Author's Note:**

> Q: Excuse me where is high catnip Hubert???  
> A: He is in your heart. Purring.


End file.
